RUNNING ON KARMA (Hong Kong, 2003)
Directed by: Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai
Starring: Andy Lau, Cecilia Cheung

“Even by Hong Kong’s cinema’s colorful standards, Running on Karma ranks as one of the looniest high concepts to date…”

— Derek Elley, Variety

"It’s surprising, stylish, kinetic, funny, intelligent, hugely entertaining and absolutely unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”

— Bruce Fletcher, San Francisco Independent Film Festival

Hong Kong Film Awards - 2003

Winner – Best Film
Winner – Best Actor – Andy Lau

Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards- 2003

Winner – Best Actor – Andy Lau
Winner – Best Actress – Cecilia Cheung
Winner – Best Screenplay

This "whatzit" from director Johnnie To (The Mission, Fulltime Killer) is a martial arts comedy/romance/police thriller that becomes a Buddhist plea for an end to all violence…after churning viewers’ brains into soft, red mush. In a year when movies in America seem to be celebrating how many ways you can scourge, crucify, fold, spindle and mutilate an actor onscreen, there’s something that makes you almost pathetically grateful for a movie that looks at the hideous violence we seem all-too-capable of, and just says “enough.” It doesn’t hurt that RUNNING ON KARMA sports some of the best-designed, most unexpectedly innovative action choreography to come out of Hong Kong since To’s classic 1999 film, The Mission.

Hong Kong’s sleeper hit of 2003, KARMA stars Andy Lau (Infernal Affairs) as Biggie, a disgraced Buddhist monk and bodybuilder who can see other people’s karma. He makes his living sneaking over the border from China to Hong Kong where he works as a stripper, stuffing his g-string with cash until he’s arrested, goes back to China, blows his bankroll on beer and chicks and then does it all over again. When he runs into a cop, Cecilia Cheung, during a nightclub raid his supernatural “karma vision” shows him that she was a WW II Japanese officer in a past life. The officer’s penchant for decapitation has left Cheung with a bucketful of bad karma that has to be worked out in this life. At the same time, a seemingly insane, Indian contortionist kills a cop, and the entire police department gears up and goes hunting, hoping to put a bullet in the head of this cop killer. Biggie’s caught in the middle, and he decides to do what he can to keep more people from getting killed. But, as Buddhism teaches over and over again, if you can’t let go of the material world, you’re going to get hurt.


In his hyper-stylized muscle suit, Andy becomes an object of meditative contemplation (focus on him and say “Om….”) in this movie that might just be one of the most beautiful and hair-brained pictures around. If you think a movie can’t entertain an audience while making a passionate plea for peace, then watch RUNNING ON KARMA and see just how wrong you are.